The Ballad of Patrick Knowlton

Headline: Witness in [Vince] Foster death loses conspiracy appeal
Washington Times, January 9, 2001, p. A7

Before he'd arrived at the end of the line
A little publicity would have been fine,
Shedding some light and putting some heat
Upon all those justices' honorable feet.

Patrick Knowlton,
The key to the Foster case.
Patrick Knowlton,
The man the press erased.

But they wait till the court in their wisdom refuse
To give him a hearing to bring us the news.
It's a story, alas, that is getting quite old;
A citizen's wronged; then he's out in the cold,
And once it's too late, the public is told.

Patrick Knowlton,
The key to the Foster case.
Patrick Knowlton,
The man the press erased.

Patrick Knowlton,
The key to the Foster case.
Patrick Knowlton,
The man the press erased.

The following passage is from pp. 314-315 of The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair:

The only game left was the witness-intimidation lawsuit of Patrick Knowlton that included several members of the FBI as parties to his intimidation.  The suit had originally been filed in October of 1996, one year after his harassment on the streets of Washington, D.C., had taken place.  A year later, the judicial branch provided some reason to be hopeful that that they were actually interested in justice in the Foster case when they forced Starr to include Knowlton’s critical submission as part of their official report over Starr’s strenuous, and well-supported objections from a legal standpoint.  We were to discover later that concerning Knowlton’s motion to include his devastating critical comments as part of Starr’s report, Judge Butzner had written persuasively to his two colleagues, “I suspect if we deny the motion we will be charged as conspirators in the cover-up.  I suggest we let the motion and the attachments speak for themselves.”

That little episode proved to be an aberration, however.  After almost three years of sitting on it, on September 9, 1999, federal Judge John Garrett Penn issued a 29-page dismissal of Knowlton’s lawsuit.  Here is the key quote from pp. 24-25 from that order of dismissal:

Plaintiff’s submissions also cause the Court to pause for another reason. The reports of two Independent Counsel [sic], Robert B. Fiske and Kenneth W. Starr, officially concluded that Mr. Foster’s death was a suicide and that the overwhelming weight of the evidence supports this conclusion. See Ayman Alouri’s Memorandum in Support of Motion (attaching as an exhibit the conclusion of report of Independent Counsel Fiske); Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr. (Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr), attached to Federal Defendants’ Response to Motion for Leave to File, at 111 (“The available evidence points clearly to suicide as the manner of death.”) and at 114 (“In sum, based on all the available evidence, which is considerable, the OIC agrees with the conclusion reached by every official entity that has examined the issue: Mr. Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993.”).

In short, he simply invoked the authority of the reports of Fiske and Starr (minus the Knowlton appendix to it), and power had effectively trumped truth and justice one more time.

David Martin